Unix® System Management Primer Plus

Host Monitoring

System administrators are responsible for servers, and they use host monitoring to track and troubleshoot server performance. Host monitoring looks at various performance and capacity parameters of a server and compares them against standard thresholds determined by the system administrator. Some of these parameters include the following:

• CPU load

• Available memory

• Paging activity

• Disk utilization

• Number of users (for public login servers)

• ICMP echo response time (ping)

Host monitoring examines the individual parts of the Unix system infrastructure, to uncover existing problems and individual performance issues that can develop into larger problems for the Unix system. Host monitoring might uncover, for example, a problem on one mail ...